28 January 2015 1:06 PM

Let me first deal with Mr Courtnadge, who wrote of my complaint that it felt a bit lonely to be against the Iraq war: ‘A bit of an exaggeration, author. The Stop The War march in London was one of the biggest the capital has ever seen ; you weren't that lonely, every normal adult who didn't believe everything written in the Murdoch press was with you.’ What a pity he wrote this without reading properly what I said: ’I recall how lonely it was to be anti-war – unless you were on the pacifist Left, which opposes all wars, good or bad, except when they are attacks on Israel (My emphasis).’ The Left was against this war largely because it misunderstood it. Like some misguided Zionists, it also wrongly saw it as helpful to Israel, when it has been anything but and (if anything) followed a pro-Saudi rather than a Zionist agenda, even though the unintended outcome, by favouring Iran, was not helpful to either Jerusalem or Ryadh. .

More intelligent leftists, seeing its anti-sovereignty, globalist implications, supported it, as more of them had supported intervention in Yugoslavia. In the same way, many conservatives, thinking it some sort of revival of British greatness, idiotically supported it. So did the neo-conservatives, many of whom were aware that their point of view has its roots in disappointed Trotskyist utopianism. Not only did I lose nearly as many friends as I had lost when I abandoned the Left. I gained few new ones. I declined invitations to speak at one ‘Stop the War’ rally because I knew that I would then have to speak alongside anti-Israel persons, and beneath banners calling for ‘Free Palestine’, an absurd slogan given the unfreedom of the areas misruled by the PA and Hamas, and actually meaning the dissolution of Israel.Many non-Murdoch newspapers (including the ‘Observer’) supported the Iraq war. I think all supported the Kosovo dress-rehearsal. I believe the BBC coverage also aided both these wars.

Mr D.Reddin writes : ’ What does it matter what Hilary Mantel's political opinions are? You should be able to separate your political and moral values from your ascetic judgments. Your brother (and the "close-minded" Richard Dawkins) was able to appreciate literature that didn't conform to his notion of good morality such as the King James Bible. He also gave a very good review of Wolf Hall. Given his undoubted independence of mind it might just mean that some people like Wolf Hall because it's good literature and not because Mrs Mantel has the "correct" political opinions. And by the way just because I disagree with you it doesn't mean I want to have you arrested, doesn't even imply it. Your shrieking of "thought crime" and "show trial" every time you are confronted by the "left wing mob" is as hysterical as any of your opponents.’

He is accompanied, of course, by ‘Bert’ (who is still after all these years searching for an alternative explanation, other than the EU Landfill directive, for the relentless abolition of weekly rubbish collections – for he has yet to acknowledged that he was wrong about this - but broke off from his research to contribute here in his usual instinctively sympathetic fashion):

‘Well, I thoroughly enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s Tudor books without knowing anything about her politics, and I thought the television dramatisation last week – modern speech included – was absolutely superb. Mr Hitchens may well take a different view, of course, but it’s rather a shame that the only reason, so it seems, to bring the subject up was resentment at what he perceives are the politics of the publishing industry.

As for whether ‘modern young actors can begin to understand the depth and scale of the convulsion that war caused in Britain in 1914’, what an odd question. Is it their youth, or the fact that they’re actors which gives rise to this doubt? And, more importantly, what does it matter, if they’re good enough actors?’

‘Paul R’ also entered the fray thus : ‘Does every novel or programme about the Tudors have to be in the language of Shakespeare? Does everything have to have a host of tedious pedants pointing out every so called inaccuracy?’

Mr ‘Mike B’ is there too (My earlier response to him is posted alongside his comment and also here) : ‘Peter Hitchens says that Hilary Mantel "is now a sort of Leftist Saint" because of her story about Margaret Thatcher. Does he have anything to back up that assertion or did it just trip, thoughtlessly, off his tongue?

Again he says that "her book about the horrible Thomas Cromwell", presumably Wolf Hall, is "bought and praised all over Guardianland", wherever that might be. In fact, it has received widespread praise from many reviewers, including those in the Times and the Telegraph.

This just strikes me as lazy journalism. Pick a caricature and stick to it. It's so much easier than thought and reasoned argument.’

***PH writes: ‘Don't be silly. Such statements or assertions are not of the same character as assertions on the lines of 'Charles Foster Kane has received billions of dollars from California oil interests', or similar. These are statements of alleged fact which can be proved or disproved. There is no formal method for creating a Leftist saint, nor any official list of such saints, and the remark is obviously a comment on the extraordinary praise and honour, and favourable coverage, and priceless publicity, heaped upon Ms Mantel and her books.

The book world, as I've pointed out here to cries of 'whingeing!' from leftists, is entirely dominated, in publishing houses, reviews, awards and festivals, by persons of the cultural, moral and political left. Ms Mantel is such a person. I think her success may have something to do with that.’

Finally, from ‘Louise’ 'Uniforms, trains, clothes are as usual carefully recreated – but not the way people actually talked or thought.

Alicia Vikander plays Vera in the moving film Testament of Youth, but can an actress as young as her understand the effect the First World War had on Britain?' And you can, I suppose?’

Yes, to some extent, I can. My surviving grandparents had both grown up before 1914, my older aunts and uncles, and many of my teachers had strong childhood memories of the War and of the changes it brought. Its memory and its effect pervaded much of our life and conversation, in a way that’s gone now. You can see how the bridge has been broken by watching the powerful BBC2 series on ‘The Great War’, in which most of the interviewees, then still healthy and alert men and women, recalled the war as an event in their lives. What’s more, I made it my business in my teens and later to read such telling contemporary memoirs as Robert Graves’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man’ , not to mention John Harris’s superb ‘Covenant with Death’ often mentioned here and based on detailed conversations with survivors of the Somme from Rotherham. And of course to read Vera Brittain’s ‘Testament of Youth’, something I was inspired to do by the BBC serialisation of the book in 1979.

If you have grown up on post-cultural-revolution Britain, the modernised, concretised, electrified, motorwayed , denatured place which sprang up after the 1960s, these nuances and indeed these profound differences between generations will escape you completely. Something similar, but not the same, can be said of the infinitely superior Television version of P.G.Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories , featuring Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, as compared with the feeble version more recently screened. Price and Carmichael had both experienced pre-war London, knew its accents, its signals and flavours and smells. They knew what Wodehouse meant.

As for Hilary Mantel, I think her generally leftist politics are pretty well-known, and became even more so after the publication of her short story ‘The assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. It matters because allegiance of this sort is undoubtedly helpful to writers of all kinds, but most especially in book publishing, where conservative ideas are despised by most reviewers. This was not only given full-scale publication by the ‘Guardian’, but also serialised on BBC Radio 4,. As it happens, I think ( and have often said ) that her short novel ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’ , set in Saudi Arabia and obviously drawn from real life, is very good. So, despite its gruelling, horrible subject matter is her novel about Africa’ A Change of Climate’.

Having read these and thought them good, I attempted her book about the French Revolution ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, but after about 200 pages in which my interest never caught fire ( and I am fascinated by the French Revolution) I abandoned it. This is a thing I rarely do to any book after sticking at it for so long.

When the fuss began about Wolf Hall, I set it aside for a good moment, looking forward to it and assuming I would find it enjoyable and rewarding. I was surprised to find that it could barely hold my eye to the page. After about 30 pages, it seemed clear to me that I could only read it by forcing myself onwards with the mental equivalent of kicks and blows. It drained out of my brain as fast as I could get it in. I decided not to continue. For some time, I thought the fault was mine, as its sales climbed and the awards began to come in.

Then I began to notice that, if one whispered softly that one had not liked it, one would meet responding whispers and mutters of ‘Thank heaven! I thought it was only me!’ from a surprising number of people. Statistically, men were less likely to enjoy it than women, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

As for Thomas Cromwell, I think she has for some reason invested him with all kinds of qualities he probably did not have. I say ‘probably', because we actually know rather little about him personally (much less than we know about Thomas More, for example) . A recent biography of him frequently resorts to conditional verbs and what looks to me like guesswork. By contrast, we know a lot about him politically, and we have the great Holbein portrait in which he looks very much like the 16th century equivalent of a Russian gangster oligarch. In his public life he was merciless, and at the end was shown no mercy.

This isn’t some kind of beauty contest between him and Thomas More, and if it were I should choose neither . More is brilliantly undone in Josephine Tey’s indispensable historical novel ‘The Daughter of Time’, and simply wasn’t the admirable man of conscience portrayed by the great Paul Schofield in that fine film ‘A Man for All Seasons’ . Nobody was. The people of these times were not like us, did not think as we do, or act as we do.

They certainly did not speak as we do, and I don’t just mean that they still used the second-person singular and the ‘eth’ and ‘est’ verb endings which are now more or less confined to Yorkshire. Actually, Robert Bolt’s use of English in the script of that film, and the play that preceded it, is a good solution. Educated men and women are portrayed as speaking in a more deliberate, grammatical style than that of today. They refer without hesitation or embarrassment to God. They have utterly different attitudes towards such things as oaths. More’s small speech on how a man swearing an oath holds his soul in his hands like water is a lovely example of this, as is his stern explanation of why he will not speak of certain things in his wife’s presence so that she can in all honesty say under examination that she never heard him do so, and his tremendous speech about how easily the Devil would come after us, once we had flattened the great forest of man’s laws that grows all over England, are all examples of that. The film gave Norfolk a Northern accent, but he still avoided speaking too much like a spin-doctor from ‘The Thick of It’.

I think we can assume that Ms Mantel is aware of ‘A Man for All Seasons’, its hagiographical portrayal of More and its depiction of Cromwell (played by Leo McKern in the days before Rumpole made him famous) as a sordid schemer. No doubt it is an interesting idea to reverse the formula. But none of the people in this drama was a modern man or woman. They all lived, thought, believed, spoke and died quite differently from us. Power’s tendency to corrupt could not be obscured by propaganda, or given a velvet cloak by smooth civil servants who took on the actual dirty work. I suppose More was, in a way, a conservative figure (though he is the first Utopian) . And Henry was, of necessity, a radical reformer, and Cromwell his chief instrument . But I don’t think that makes Thomas Cromwell a sort of English Robespierre (or Oliver Cromwell, come to that).

By the standards of the French revolutionaries and all that came after them, all these men are severe and unbending reactionaries. It was Madame Guillotine that gave birth to the idea the left still love to this day, though some of those ideas had been in gestation for many decades before the Terror.

I do not ‘shriek’ ‘thought crime’ and ‘show trial’ every time I am confronted by the left-wing mob. Only when it fits.

You would have to have a completely tin ear ( and many do, it is true) not to realise that much of the Authorised Version of the Bible is great poetry. Truth, in all matters including literary merit, is the daughter of time, and it was no great leap by my brother (or Professor Dawkins) for him to acknowledge that King James version is beautiful. His problem was in understanding why this might be so and whether there is any connection between form and content.

If Hilary Mantel’s books are still around and being read with pleasure and instruction 400 years hence, then it will be clear that I was wrong, For now, I’d only say that the past is littered with the works of authors (Hugh Walpole, Herbert Spencer, Charles Morgan, Sinclair Lewis spring to mind) who were once loved by all the critics and bought by millions and now are so unread you can’t even find their works at the back-end of obscure second-hand shops.

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11 August 2014 4:56 PM

Something mustn’t be done. Or must it? I resigned myself to the usual gasps of horror, incomprehension and dismay at my callousness, when I wrote on Sunday that I was against intervention in Iraq. But I hope that eventually the good sense of my position will become clear.

From a purely British perspective, the question is far simpler because I doubt very much if there is anything Britain can actually do, apart from dropping food and water from cargo planes and hoping a) that it doesn’t fall on top of the people we want to help b) that it survives the impact and c) that the intended recipients, rather than their persecutors, actually find it. But that’s not intervention. Intervention means bombs and troops.

As for them, few people (especially loyalist Tories wilfully unaware of the true nature of David Cameron) grasp just how much our armed forces have been devastated in the last five years. I am genuinely unsure how we would be able to mount any significant military intervention in Iraq now, except as passengers on American technology.

THE MORAL DISHONESTY OF LIBERAL INTERVENTION

But from a general perspective there are several reasons to hold back.

The first is that this sort of thing is profoundly morally dishonest. We favour intervention because it makes us feel good, not because we really wish to do good. Generally we are clueless about the countries we say we are going to help, the history, geography and conditions there. And generally we want someone else to do the things that will make us feel good. I would respect any person who volunteered either for dangerous military service or to go and do relief work, or who offered to open his home to refugees for years to come. But just *being in favour* of other people doing something is morally vacuous, or worse.

We believe transparently false claims, such as that bombs can be dropped accurately.

We imagine that we can influence events now with force, but are not prepared to remain permanently,

In which case the force we defeated is quite likely to reassert itself.

We imagine that it is as easy to get troops into (and out of ) a country as it is to insert a TV crew.

If we examined our actions as a country, we would admit that we had done much (in the name of goodness) to bring about the disaster we now seek to stop by yet more intervention.

ADMIT YOUR PAST MISTAKES BEFORE MAKING ANY NEW ONES

But until we admit our past mistakes, how can we possibly be fit to take new actions which are equally likely to have unintended consequences? Oh, but surely everyone now admits the Iraq invasion was wrong. Well, in a way, they do. But only symbolically. Politicians and their media allies who cheered for the war, and in some cases helped propagate the lies that started it, may have mumbled some admissions of error. But they are still prominent in public life, and in many cases are still listened to seriously.

PENANCE FOR WARMONGERS

In my view, every politician and columnist who backed the Iraq war should have that fact displayed, in large red letters, next to everything they write, should be forced to admit it, before they make any policy statement or call for any actions. If they speak in public, especially for a fee, a large red notice should be displayed on the podium reminding the audience that this person supported the Iraq war. Likewise, the same label should be prominently displayed on screen whenever they speak or are interviewed on TV, and should be mentioned at the beginning and the end of every appearance they make on radio. I’d like to see a bit of penance, too, perhaps some unpaid lavatory cleaning at Headley Court, and other places where the terribly injured soldiers from their war try to recover.

These labels can be removed, and these penances relaxed, as soon as all the people, who are dead because of the policy they espoused, are no longer dead. And as soon as all the people maimed as a result, are no longer maimed. But until then, I really think the supporters of the war ought to suffer a bit. Alternatively, they could just drop out of public life, and then we could forget all about them.

IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS, WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?

Violent persecution of Christians by Islamist fanatics has been under way in Iraq pretty much since we and the Americans invaded that country in 2003. It was so bad that about half the country’s Christians fled to Syria to escape persecution, including murder and kidnap, and the bombing of churches. Nobody lifted a finger to stop this, any more than anyone in the ‘West’ even knows about the endless anti-Christian discrimination in the territories of ‘Free Palestine’ (as they humorously call it on the placards), or the rapidly worsening position of Christians in Egypt. Indeed, we made it much worse by turning Syria into a hellhole too, in our pursuit of ‘democracy’ there.

Christians in Iraq were *comparatively* safe and untroubled as long as Saddam remained in power. Until the invasion, the secular tyranny of Saddam (itself the inheritor of our own imperial possession of Iraq) had held such things in check not out of kindness but simply because it suited Saddam’s policy.

Christians in Syria were among the safest in the Middle East.

ODD THAT OPPONENTS OF ISLAMISM WERE SO KEEN TO DESTROY THE SECULAR STATES THAT CONTAINED IT

From the point of view of those who now get so het up about Islamic fanaticism, Saddam’s Iraq was a demi-paradise. Women went unveiled, the influence of religion over public life was kept to a minimum, Shia-Sunni friction was slight. Odd then that the same critics of ‘Islamo-fascism’ were almost all keen supporters of the overthrown of Saddam by illegal armed force in 2003. You would have to ask them how they got into this swamp of contradictions, though the irrational hysteria of the intellectuals, which swept the West after September 11th 2001, has a lot to answer for.

‘Something must be done!’, they shouted.

‘This is something!’ cried the people who had long wanted to attack Iraq.

‘Oh, well, great, we will do that, then’, said the ‘Something must be done!’ people, as they usually do. And disaster followed, as it usually does.

Now, having made such a terrible mess, you might have thought we would have learned that there is usually something worse than an Arab tyrant.

But a few years ago the fashion began to grow, in London, Paris and Washington, for demanding the overthrow of the Syrian government of Bashir el-Assad. All kinds of diplomats and weighty journalists discovered that the Assad government was not very nice . These tended to be the same people who have for years been failing to notice that Turkey’s new President (and let’s see how that turns out ) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is not very nice, and even praising him despite his increasingly repressive and militantly Islamist government. Mr Erdogan, as it happens , would then enormously assist the forces whose growth and strength led to the formation of ISIS.

I have always assumed this new sensitivity about Syria really originated in Saudi Arabia (that paradise of the rule of law, free speech and conscience, democracy etc), which loathes Syria because the Assads are Alawis. I can never fathom this religious position in detail, but Alawis are certainly closer to Shia Islam than they are to the puritan version of Sunni Islam espoused by Riyadh. And in any case, they are the allies of Shia Iran, the hated foe of Saudi Arabia in the real contest in the Middle East - between Riyadh and Teheran, which is at the heart of almost everything that happens there.

Anyway, we then began supporting ‘pro-democracy activists’ in Syria, a policy which I was one of the few people in this country to oppose, mainly because I wasn’t sure that ‘pro-democracy’ was an accurate description of these gentlemen , and because I *specifically* feared for the future of Syria’s Christians (I have emphasized below the passage in which I warned of this more than two years ago).I redoubled my opposition after I was contacted by British people living in Syria who warned me that many of them were foreign fighters, of a distinctly Islamist type.

I first wrote about this here at length on 12th February 2012

‘THE BBC is working hard to get us to go to war in Syria. Its incessant coverage is - as it was in Libya and Egypt - mostly dim, partial and unquestioning. This should cease.

If there is a rebellion against a dictatorship, then it must, as far as the BBC is concerned, be noble. If a government defends itself against rebellion, it must, according to the BBC, be wrong.

Great slabs of history tell us that this is not necessarily so. In this case, I tremble for the fate of Syria's Arab Christians if the Assad regime falls.

Bad is often replaced by worse. This is already happening in Egypt and Libya, though the BBC seldom troubles to record the aftermath of the 'Arab Spring' it welcomed so simple-mindedly.

Perhaps the Corporation is trying to please our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, an increasingly pathetic figure who seems to have mistaken military intervention in foreign countries for conservatism. Someone should also ask him why he gets so outraged about Syria, and was not outraged by equally bloody repression in Bahrain.

It seems that, having been refused UN permission to destabilise Damascus under the blue flag, we are now looking at running guns to the rebels. What British interest is served by this dangerous policy?

The revolt in Syria would long ago have faded away had it not been for the noisy support of Washington and London. Much of the bloodshed and destruction is, I believe, the responsibility of the 'West', which has falsely encouraged naive people to believe that Nato helicopters and bombers are just over the horizon.’

Then, I wrote on 9th June 2012:

‘The truth seeps out of Syria

I have been contacted by a group of Western women who live in Syria and who believe that most of what the world is being told about that country is false.

As far as I can discover, they are not stooges of what they agree to be a rather nasty government in Damascus, but exactly what they say they are: normal human beings caught up in a political tornado. For obvious reasons, I have promised to protect their identities.

I urge you to read what follows, because it is important, because our emotional interventions in other countries never do any good, and because it is vital that people resist attempts to drag us into Syria, too, by feeding us one-sided atrocity propaganda.

On the 11th June that year I then wrote this:

‘A scoffing contributor splutters that it is surely absurd that anyone in Syria would contact *me* of all people, about problems with the coverage of the present crisis.

Well, I can say that some of my correspondents did in fact contact more ‘mainstream’ media outlets about what they saw as severe bias, and were either ignored or rebuffed. They came to me because they had read online what I had written, and thought (rightly) that I would be more sympathetic.

The bias of the media towards a crude good versus bad interpretation of Syria is not the result of a particular political view or direct interest. Far from it. Most of those involved would have trouble finding Syria on a map, and know nothing of its history.

But, as I explained in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, media outlets are terribly conformist, and tend to follow a line, and all stories which do not fit that line are ignored are discarded, or buried in obscure corners.

The ‘Arab Spring’ is a terribly simple and easy formula for newsdesks and presenters, though the problem is increasingly to define the rebels. Where the rebels were of a type we disapproved of (in Iraq, after the Anglo-American invasion), they were ‘insurgents’. Had they been approved of, they would have been the ‘resistance’. Likewise, in Syria, ‘our side’ must not be called ‘rebels’ or ‘revolutionaries’. They are called ‘activists’, a word so meaningless that if demands analysis. What is it supposed to suggest? Some sort of protestor in a good cause, perhaps in the poorer part of Chicago or Glasgow, raising important issues with the authorities?

It certainly does not bring to mind the idea of a rather well-organised and (I believe) quite well-armed faction, equipped by foreign powers and dominated by Islamist fanatics of the type we have for the past ten years been taught to fear and loathe.

This mindset is also capable of believing almost anything about the wickedness of the regime . Now, it is a nasty regime, and I make no doubt about that. But we have a difficulty with all such post-colonial regimes, because they draw their legitimacy from us. Even more than in Libya, where the King we left behind was overthrown by Gadaffi and his fellow-officers, and we later recognised that regime, Syria is a direct inheritor of the defunct French Empire. The only previous legitimate authority there was the Ottoman Empire( complainers about the legitimacy of Israel have a similar problem) . If we are going to classify this hitherto recognised state as a ‘regime’ worthy of overthrow, what is the consistent basis on which we decide which states are acceptable and which are not?

For years western diplomacy and media ignored the wrongs of the Assads ( I used to have a virtual monopoly, among British journalists of even knowing about the 1982 massacre in [Hama], because in those days the media only cared about Arab deaths if they had been caused by Israel. Arabs killed by other Arabs were of no interest, apparently). It is much the same as the current blank ignorance about the Caucasus and Central Asia, where Hillary Clinton consorts with all kinds of dubious figures and nobody cares, or thinks it odd in the light of her burning conscience about Syria. The day will come when we learn a lot more about this crucial, oil-and-gas-filled region (I have already taken the trouble to go there and find out).

Now, as in the Houla massacre, the Assad government is guilty even if the evidence against it is confused on any terms. Take the initial reporting of the Houla massacre ( I have no doubt, by the way, that there was such a massacre, though as far as I know it remains to be properly established who was massacred by whom). We were , at the beginning, shown horrible pictures of murdered children, plainly killed at close quarters. At the same time, we were told that the Syrian army had caused the massacre with shellfire. So anxious were those involved to blame Damascus directly that nobody seemed to see the rather obvious difficulty, that shell fire would not have, could not have, caused the sorts of injuries in the photographs. Whatever had taken place, the reports of it lacked basic professional scepticism.

A UN spokesman’s unwillingness to attribute responsibility to anyone at that stage was mentioned, but over-ridden, or bypassed in reports Only later was a new culprit, an Alawite militia, named (more credibly) as being responsible. It may well have been the fault of Assad, but that *had not been established* . A rush to judgement is always unwise. For some reason the British government is anxious to take the Saudi and Turkish side (the militant Salafi and Sunni side) in this complex conflict. Its enthusiasm should surely be open to question. William Hague, the foreign Secretary, did at least mention the possibility that the ‘activists’ may have been responsible for bad things in the Commons yesterday, but he is still an enthusiast for a process which is headed rapidly towards intervention, and which accords Damascus absolutely no right to defend itself from attack.

That is, in effect, a cancellation of Syria’s national sovereignty. What forces do we have, able to replace Syrian national sovereignty with a stable and peaceful government of that territory, a complicated and dangerously unstable balance of forces? Our supposedly benevolent interventions have already displaced untold numbers of Christians in Iraq, and caused who-knows-what terrors and miseries in ‘liberated’ Libya. Why are we so sure we will do any better this time?’

This sort of propaganda has a price. I hope you have noticed the continuing tally of deaths of selfless British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a cause long ago abandoned.

And I hope you have also noticed that Libya, 'rescued' by us a few months ago, is now a failed state whose main international airport was recently taken over by gangsters, and where unjustly arrested prisoners are starved and tortured in secret dungeons.

One of my informants from Syria writes of the 'activists' we hear so much about: 'These protesters are not peaceful, flower-carrying people wanting freedom. No, they are weapon-toting killers who snipe, who ambush, who fire upon the army with the sole purpose of inciting riot and mayhem.'

She blames Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria's minorities of Alawites and Christians. She says many of the 'activists' are foreigners, a view shared by all my informants. Many of the 'activists' are armed.

Armed intervention is in fact well under way, uncondemned by the UN, which readily attacks the Syrian government for defending itself. Another writes: 'I have seen reports of opposition rallies which showed pictures of pro-government rallies, and reports purporting to be from the north Syrian countryside, where it has been an incredibly wet year, which appear to have been taken in some desert. The news being accepted as truth by BBC World News is so biased these days that I no longer believe what they say about anything any more, after more than 60 years of crediting them with the truth.'

She says she has spoken to a man who took part in a march at Hama last summer. He 'was worried for his safety, but was given a red rose to carry and assured the whole thing would be calm and orderly, and seeing many other men from the mosque joining in with their small sons, he agreed. They walked for a very few minutes, the unarmed police watching them from the wayside, then a man next to him pulled out a gun and shot the nearest policeman dead.'

A riot followed, reported by foreign TV stations as a police attack on peaceful marchers.

I expect to have more to say on this in weeks to come.’

I might add that , round about the same time, once again as an isolated, much-scorned and attacked anti-interventionist in a country besotted with the idea that intervention was good, I wrote about the Libya adventure in these terms :

‘DAVID CAMERON'S war of personal vanity still rages on, its aim and its end unknown. Our ludicrous Libyan allies - who may in fact be our enemies - fight each other as we protect their so-called army from Colonel Gaddafi. If we don't send weapons and troops to help them, they have no hope of winning. Will we? Or will we, in desperation, wink at an assassination of the Colonel, an action that will take us close to his moral level? Or will we, by then, be too busy bombing our way to the Big Society in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe, China and anywhere else where government doesn't reach our leader's alleged high ethical standards? Nobody knows. Ministers, apparently with no idea of the forces they have unleashed, drawl that it's as long as a piece of string.

Ho ho. Or maybe it's as long as the rope needed to hang themselves. Yet the House of Commons endorses this leap in the dark with a vote so overwhelming that you wonder if they put something in the water, or whatever it is they drink. What are all these costly people for? Last year we worried about their expenses. This year we should be worried about their salaries. We hired them to question and watch the Government, not to do what the Prime Minister tells them. Aren't we still recovering from the gullibility of MPs (and the media) over Saddam Hussein? Do we learn nothing from experience? Are too many of us, and them, just too thick to be in charge of a small nuclear power? It seems so.

MPs should be reminded they are not the employees of Downing Street, but of us. I am quite sure that a huge number of British people do not want this war, and for good reasons. It is not in our national interests. We can't even protect old ladies from rapists in our own country, and perhaps we should sort that out before reforming Africa.

They correctly think it is not our affair. After being told that we can't even afford public libraries, they have to watch Liam Fox burning great mounds of banknotes (provided by us) as he rains costly munitions on Tripoli.

THEY are baffled to see the remains of our naval power towed surreptitiously to a Turkish scrapyard, because we allegedly cannot afford it. And meanwhile, an obscure public relations man who has never fought in a war poses as the saviour of Benghazi.

Where was the British people's voice in the Commons on Monday? I don't care much what the UN, that rabble of torturers and tyrants, thinks. I would cheerfully see it abolished.

I have no idea why we still need Nato 20 years after the threat it was formed to face vanished for ever. The fact that it has endorsed Mr Cameron's adventure doesn't comfort me.

What really troubles me is that Parliament wasn't asked its opinion until after the missiles were launched. It was treated, contemptuously, like a neutered chihuahua, a pitiful yapping thing to be pushed about by the Premier's polished toecap, and patted as long as it fawned. And if it doesn't now revolt against this treatment, then that is what it will have proved itself to be.

I believe that the Government knew by Friday, March 18 that it was more or less certain it would begin military action on the evening of Saturday, March 19. There was time to call a special session of the Commons.

And there was a precedent - the Falklands. The first motion before the House on Monday should have been a censure of the Government for launching a war of choice without seeking Parliamentary approval.

Yet, while the whole engine of British diplomacy was devoted to getting Mr Cameron's war past the UN, Nato and (of course) our ultimate rulers in the EU, Westminster was forgotten.

And so were we.

This is wrong. Those involved should not get away with it. Later on, I shall say I told you so. Just now, I'm telling you so.’

And now I can say ‘I told you so’. This prophecy business is, in fact, startlingly easy. You just have to make the tiniest effort to find out what is really going on. And you can then be right where all the intellectuals and statesmen are wrong. The problem is in getting anyone to pay attention when it is still possible to change the outcome.

At the time, I faced incredulity and derision from almost everyone I knew, that I should be taking these positions.

Various examples of ‘successful’ interventions have been put forward by those who are actually still trying to defend the one in Iraq. Among these are the Falklands (not an intervention in a sovereign state, but a recovery of sovereign territory lawlessly invaded) Kuwait (as in the Falklands) , Bosnia, not over yet, Kosovo, not over yet, and Sierra Leone, not over yet. Remember, when being told how wonderful these interventions are that the same people, until about 18 months ago, were still vigorously defending the Al Maliki government (which everybody know agrees is a corrupt, sectarian, repressive disaster) in Baghdad as a triumph of democracy.

I advise all enthusiasts for intervention to see that clever film ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ , itself about an intervention that later backfired on its progenitors in the most spectacular and unexpected way. Do we really have the knowledge to play God in this way? And if we don't, dare we act?

Particularly to the point is the story about the Zen Master towards the end of the film, which you can watch here (profanity warning). I think the sound of the aeroplane flying overhead may be meant to prefigure September 11th.

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07 May 2014 2:50 PM

Roger Boyes of ‘The Times’ has now returned from Waitrose (whither he went when he was losing an argument with me about Ukraine) and has drawn to my attention an article he has written for that newspaper, under the restrained and judicious headline ‘The new Mussolini and his axis of the macho. Europe’s nationalists see Putin as an ally. But, as Ukraine shows, he has no respect for borders’.

Lackaday, I cannot link to it for it is behind Mr Rupert Murdoch’s paywall. I can’t even quote any more than small bits of it. But I can mention that it is adorned with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, posing with fists on hips in a stance of greater-than-usual arrogance. The caption beneath this study runs : ‘Vladimir Putin is a post-fascist, heir to Benito Mussolini, not Joseph Stalin’.

How odd. Why would a caption to a picture of Mussolini *begin* with the words ‘Vladimir Putin’? I can’t think of another example of this practice.

But then again I suppose we must welcome the open-minded, nay, even-handed thinking which has led Mr Boyes or his editor to concede that Vladimir Putin is not Stalin. This is a major step forward, I suppose. For me, it’s simple. Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk. Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died. Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe. Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him. Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..

But many at ‘The Times’ and elsewhere in Murdochworld seem to have bought their political telescopes from some strange Iraq War surplus shop. Viewed through these instruments, almost everyone looks like either Stalin or Hitler (depending on the particular crisis involved) . And all kinds of other strange objects can also be seen. Readers of M.R. James’s ghost story ‘A View From A Hill’, will be familiar with the idea of a sinister telescope or field glass which shows the user what dead men’s eyes have seen. The Murdochscope, by contrast, shows you what other men’s minds have mistakenly imagined. Far, far off it can also descry weapons of mass destruction somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

As for ‘respect for borders’, I’m not sure that the neo-conservative globalist movement is very troubled by borders, or entitled to get hoity-toity about them. Apart from supporting their total abolition in continental Europe through Schengen, what about (here I go again) Kosovo and Cyprus, anyone? Or, come to that, Iraq, now shorn for all intents and purposes of Iraqi Kurdistan, a ‘western’ protectorate. If airspace counts as a border, Libya also deserves a mention.

Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.

And Mr Boyes is intelligent enough not to do that, just as he really ought to know that Moscow has referred to itself as the third Rome for many centuries. But Mussolini? According to Mr Boyes, Mr Putin is a ‘post-fascist, an heir to Benito Mussolini’. But apart from using such phrases as ‘right wing’ and such expressions as ‘nationalist’, which thought-free left-wingers employ to win the plaudits of their friends without actually having to explain the assumed wickedness of these positions, there’s really very little to justify either headline or picture. Mussolini and Putin really do not have that much in common and nor (alas for Russia) does Russia have much in common with Italy.

Instead, he speaks darkly of meetings between Mr Putin and various nationalist parties of the anti-immigration sort, which left-wing 1968 types like to call ‘fascist’ long after George Orwell rightly dismissed the word as having no real meaning. Once again I reproduce his words from ‘Politics and the English Language’ : ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. This is even more true than it was when Orwell first wrote it in 1946, and I am amazed at the number of members of my trade who are either unaware of it (which is shameful), or who ignore it (which is lazy).

I agree that this is itself interesting, though I have to say that I personally wouldn’t give the time of day to any of these nationalist formations, and I would add such meetings to my criticism of Mr Putin. But it’s interesting because it does tend to underline my point that what separates Mr Putin from any other major political figure is that he is a supporter of national sovereignty. It is the single characteristic of the man which separates him from all other major figures in world politics. Others are despots. Others run corrupt states. Others are secretive. None defends sovereignty. And modern euro-politics has turned sovereignty( see below) from a mainstream opinion to an eccentric heresy.

This, above and beyond all things, is what really riles the forces of Blairism and Murdochism, in whose newspaper Mr Boyes writes. They are revolutionary internationalists, open-borders enthusiasts, scornful of national sovereignty , of protection of national industries and of immigration control. They search for pretexts to invade and overthrow states of which they do not approve, for whatever reason.

That is why (and they never answer this point) they were quite happy to put up with the gross misbehaviour of Boris Yeltsin, from rigged elections to shelling his own parliament to savage war against the Chechens. This of course is because Mr Yeltsin let the ‘West’ plunder his country without restraint, and because he did not get in the way of its various Blairite adventures.

But they won’t forgive Vladimir Putin for sins which are in many cases rather smaller. I am told this is ‘whataboutery’ , whatever that is. Well, if it is, then ‘whataboutery’ is a very powerful argument, just as ‘Tu quoque’ (‘You did it too’) has always been. If you claim to act out of principle, and you can be shown not to be doing so, then your claim is destroyed. And a principle, by its nature, applies in all cases. I am sorry I need to explain this, but it seems necessary. If you attack Mr Putin , the questions ‘Why then do you not similarly attack Messrs Yeltsin, Erdogan, Sisi, Xi Jinping for the same faults?’ must be answered. In fact can I put in here a very loud plea for someone to say *something* about Egypt, the last place where all right-minded people naively backed the Utopian mob, so plunging a moderately unhappy country into the pit of misery and hysterical repression where it now wallows, uncriticised by us.

The answer may lie in words written by Zbigniew Brzezinski( Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and the unsung architect of Moscow’s doomed intervention and eventual downfall in Afghanistan. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

I have no doubt that similar words could be found (if we could read them) in the textbooks studied by trainee Russian diplomats, at the great elite MGIMO university on Vernadsky Prospect in Moscow.

Machine-gunning the Russian President with words such as ‘Faustian’ ‘Far Right’, ‘macho’ and Mussolini is no substitute for a grown-up analysis. Nor does it begin to cope with the problem of Russia, a huge and important country, released from its Soviet prison and trying to find its place in a world utterly different from the one in which it last existed.

Remember, when the Russian empire fell, the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires still existed, not to mention the British and French global empires. But Russia, even without Ukraine, remains one of the biggest land empires in human history. It has a huge task of repair, recovery and rebuilding, moral as well as physical. It will look at the world in ways different from ours a bankrupt empire turned into a client of another empire, and largely ruled by yet another empire. And who is to say it is wrong to do so?

In a little-noticed but fascinating story in which Vladimir Putin resisted both threats and inducements, from the country which has the *real* special relationship with the USA, to drop support for Syria. One explanation for this behaviour might be, er principle, even if in the end it is a self-serving one (for without sovereignty, Russia can expect to become a globally-run oilfield and source of cheap labour, much of its territory surrendered de facto to the EU and to China.). But the Putin of the caricature couldn’t possibly possess such a quality, could he?

What I find most interesting is that a desire for national sovereignty, which I was brought up to believe was normal, creditable and sensible, even desirable, has now been relegated to being a disreputable fringe position, held only by dodgy Poujadist parties. By the same principle, patriotism has become a form of bigotry, and mild social democracy, a mixed economy, reasonably strong trades unions, protection of strategic industries from foreign purchase or competition, have apparently become comparable with Venezuelan Communism.

It makes no sense to me. I must have been away when they held the briefing, which is why I still don’t think that Mr Putin is a modern Mussolini. He is just what he is, and needs to be understood as such.

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06 March 2014 4:47 PM

A few short additions to earlier debates. First, the Grey Coat School now confirms that it was a grammar school until September 1977. The school declines to share its language aptitude test with me, or you. It says : ‘The aptitude for languages test is the same each year, so to avoid any applicant having an advantage over another, we do not allow copies in advance. The test is based on a fictional language which builds from simple words to longer sentences and hence knowledge of a particular foreign language is not necessary.’

No, I am not a paid agent of the Russian government, not that such denials would convince anyone daft enough to believe any such thing. I might point out that I appeared on RT on Wednesday (an appearance for which I received no payment, was offered none and requested none, and for which I travelled to and from the studio on my bicycle), and perhaps ( see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNnVj8dVfE ) disappointed any who thought I might take a straight Kremlin line. Note the long silence when I say that both sides are guilty of interference.

I have, as it happened, never ceased to criticise the Putin government for its lawlessness and corruption. I just don’t think that, in these matters, it is notably worse than many other governments with which we are happy to do business, and against which we do not create alliances (eg China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan) . It’s the same problem as one gets with Israel. In both cases the critics attack the country for things that plenty of other countries do (but they don’t criticise those countries as well). The real reason for the criticism is elsewhere. The disdain for the Putinocracy is a pretext. My interest remains the globalism versus national sovereignty conflict.

It might be said that the intervention of Russia in sovereign Ukraine rather knocks this down. I don’t agree. As I’ve said before, Ukraine’s sovereignty is a pretty nebulous thing, and is a temporary consequence of Russian weakness. If Gorbachev had handled things better in 1991, Ukraine and Belarus would still be run from Moscow and nobody would care very much. Now, of course, the return of Ukraine to direct Moscow rule is more or less unthinkable. But it’s quite possible for Ukraine to return to Russia’s sphere of influence, or even for large parts of the country to be given so much regional autonomy that it is effectively partitioned (a feasible outcome of the current crisis). That would make it much easier for the Western Ukraine to get closer to the EU.

I stress this isn’t a sneer at Ukraine or Ukrainians. I also regard my own country’s sovereignty as more or less non-existent, and what’s left of it fast disappearing. It’s just a statement of fact. The issue only arises because Russia, uniquely, still more or less has a large population, certainly has oil and gas, and still possesses nuclear weapons and a security council veto, plus a well-educated professional diplomatic corps trained in the pursuit of national self-interest and good intelligence services. It also has sizeable armed forces, though how these measure up against (say)those of the USA is open to question. Thus it can still function as a medium-sized power, despite the existence of the two superpowers China and the USA.

It was this status, of medium-sized power, which Britain and France tried and failed to retain in the Suez episode in 1956. They were obstacles, and they were removed, Russia is not such an easy conquest, not least because its empire was contiguous rather than scattered about the globe.

What about thus planned referendum on Crimean independence? Well, Kosovo held one of those and got a 99% yes vote, but nothing happened for years. Then Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, and was recognised by the USA and much of NATO (though not all). Russia refused. This leads to an amusing situation where Russia could claim Kosovo as a precedent for Crimean secession, and the West can point out that, since Russia didn’t recognise Kosovar independence, it can’t consistently recognise Crimean independence either. I do wonder how they will sort this out. This is why I suspect that enhanced autonomy, within Ukraine, may end up as the outcome. There’s no doubt that almost everything about Crimea is an anomaly . A sensible Ukrainian government ( and sensible statesmen from anywhere) would see that it was so, and be willing to discuss special arrangements which saved face.

But the arrogant aggression of the Western politicians who supported the destabilisation of the Kiev government wasn’t sensible, and appeared to be driven by pique over the refusal of Viktor Yanukovych to sign a deal with the EU. Pique, and moralising, are not good bases for foreign policy. Other countries have interests . Unless you are prepared to go to war to overcome those interests, you just have to learn to live with them. And there are lots of different forms of aggression and interference. Russia’s are more obvious and traditional, but that doesn’t necessarily make them worse.

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05 September 2013 2:54 PM

‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’, was a favourite chant of protestors against the Vietnam war. It was also scrawled in ragged capitals on a very long hoarding in Broad Street, Oxford, for much of the summer and autumn of 1967. Every time I went past it (for then as now I was an Oxford townie), I would hug to myself the secret knowledge (confided by him) that my late brother, Christopher, was personally and solely responsible for the inscription, which he said had taken him an alarmingly long time to do, in days when there were still proper police patrols in England. Tourists would photograph it. It lasted for many months. I seem to recall it once featured in a TV programme. I always meant to tease him about it, once he had decided to support the Iraq war. But, for one reason or another, that was never possible and now never will be. I get a bit of a lump in my throat, remembering it.

‘LBJ’, for those whose knowledge of history is restricted to the Romans, the Tudors and the Nazis, referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States.

The Vietnam war was, well, what was it? Anyway, it was a thing everyone under 20 was against, throughout the Western world. I used to be against it myself. Then I was for it, for a bit. Now I rather think I’m against it again, but I can’t claim to have done enough homework to be half as sure as I was when I was 16. Fortunately, my views on the subject matter even less now than they did then, though I suppose that, as part of the great Rentamob of the era, I probably helped to destroy much that I now wish had survived.

In fact I once owned a North Vietnamese flag, which I would wave about at demonstrations of all kinds, to signify my support of the National Liberation Front and of dear old Ho Chi Minh, the avuncular wispily bearded sage who headed the North Vietnamese police state which we then hoped would win the war, and sweep away with Americans and their client state in South Vietnam .

I think it was mainly because we disapproved of the Americans. We just did. I was, like most protestors, more or less clueless about the details of the quarrel. Sometimes, we would chant ‘Ho! Ho! Ho chi Minh!’ as if his mere name was enough to resolve any doubts that bystanders might have. Did they put something in the water about then? They certainly put something in the cigarettes. It sometimes seems to be the only explanation for the general (and more or less permanent) departure of reason from the country. Years later, I had one of those lookingGlass moments when I found myself living in a Moscow street, very close to a square named after Ho chi Minh and featuring a surprisingly tasteful memorial to the old monster. There in the heart of the Evil Empire, the rebellious was respectable, and vice versa.

When I wrote a few years ago about the horrible year of 1968, I quoted Timon’s curse from Shakespeare (cleverly applied to this era by Bernard Levin in his superb book ‘the Pendulum Years). It runs : ‘Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench and minister in their steads! To general filths convert green virginity! Do it in your parents' eyes! ...

Son of sixteen, pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire; With it, beat out his brains ... Lust and liberty, creep in the minds and manners of our youth, that 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive and drown themselves in riot!'

Much of what I’ve written since, especially my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ has been an attempt to understand and explain ( and atone for) that odd convulsion, which was proof against all criticism at the time and which still affects all our lives so deeply. The other day, researching background for a novel I shall probably never write, I looked up the records of Oxford in the revolutionary 1960s (How many familiar names stood out from the crumbling pages, so long ago yet so recent too) and the seeds of every modern evil, especially drugs and abortion, but also the severe intolerance of the modern left, were already flourishing in that sunny walled garden.

But to return for a moment to Vietnam and the rest, one thing which was quite universal among the 1968 generation was a detestation of war, and especially the bombing of foreign countries for their own good.

Now, and it’s one of the most interesting things in the world that this is so, in the more thoughtful regions of the Left, there’s a contrasting love for war and bombing, the Chicago School, as one might teasingly call it, of people who are inspired by the speech delivered by Anthony Blair in Chicago in April 1999. This was the one which justified dumping the 350 years of wisdom since the Peace of Westphalia had accepted that you didn’t interfere in foreign countries because you didn’t like the way they were governed.

This conclusion had been reached after the Thirty Years War had shown what happened when you *did* interfere on such grounds. Much of the continent looked like like a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of Hell.

I have never believed that he understood what he was doing, domestically or internationally. But others did understand.

But the speech contains a beautiful, near-perfect example of the ‘Good War’ concept I wrote about yesterday, in which all our foes are versions of Hitler, and we are all versions of Churchill : ‘This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.’

Very little work has been done, in the years since, on the actual fate of Kosovo or on the real nature of the ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ to whom we lent the airpower of the North Atlantic Treaty. It is my belief, from what I have read, that the outcome has not been an unmixed joy, especially for the Serbian minority and the Orthodox Christian heritage in that place, and that the KLA are not necessarily gentlemen. I also remain fascinated by the way in which the Yugoslav Federation could not be permitted to coexist with the rival federation of the EU (in a milder, slower way, the United Kingdom, and its one-time semi-detached but actually rather close relationship with Ireland has also been quietly loosened by devolution).

The real core of the speech lay elsewhere. It was a proclamation of the end of the Nation State: ‘Globalisation’ Mr Blair trilled ‘has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon.

‘We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations.

‘Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world. Financial instability in Asia destroys jobs in Chicago and in my own constituency in County Durham. Poverty in the Caribbean means more drugs on the streets in Washington and London. Conflict in the Balkans causes more refugees in Germany and here in the US. These problems can only be addressed by international co-operation.

‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.

‘On the eve of a new Millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organising our international institutions.’

National sovereignty, a thing all previous British prime ministers had at least claimed to value, was now to be dismissed as ‘isolationism’ and ‘protectionism’. What had previously been normal was now redefined as a discredited dogma. Those who had for years seen Communism as the great revolutionary force in the world were now able to transfer their allegiance to a globalised, multicultural USA. That’s why you find so many Marxists cheering on the missiles.

These were the rules for intervention he set out.

‘Looking around the world there are many regimes that are undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts. If we wanted to right every wrong that we see in the modern world then we would do little else than intervene in the affairs of other countries. We would not be able to cope.

‘So how do we decide when and whether to intervene. I think we need to bear in mind five major considerations

‘First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.’

Personally I find these rules rather incoherent. But have his heirs and successors even abided by them, especially on the questions of prudence, and of staying to see the matter through? Were they really observed at the time? Were such things as the Rambouillet accords on Yugoslavia (which no sovereign government could possibly have accepted) a real attempt to exhaust all diplomatic options? Have Britain and the USA seriously attempted to pursue peace in Syria? Who judges?

Well, here’s a intervention backed by the Chicago School, the one we engineered in Libya, by claiming (as in Kosovo and as in Syria) to be acting to prevent a massacre. I’ve always thought evidence of the likelihood of this massacre was in rather short supply, but leave that aside.

How is Libya getting on, since our humanitarian intervention? I’ve mentioned elsewhere the failed attempt by our supposed friends to kill the British ambassador, and their successful attempt to kill the US ambassador. I’ve mentioned their desecration of a British war cemetery in Benghazi, with special attention paid to smashing the gravestones of Jewish soldiers.

One particularly striking fact is this – that ‘Free Libya’, actually an oil producing state, is now importing oil to keep its power stations going because production has almost completely stopped. I remember a similar paradox in Iraq during my visits there after the invasion, with immense queues at the petrol stations.

The invasion has , it seems to me, made things worse. Muammar Gadaffi was without doubt a wicked tyrant, and more than a little unhinged. But why did anyone think that, by overthrowing him, they could guarantee that his successors would be better? The same dim vision seems to inform those who wish to overthrow the Assad state in Syria. Can they guarantee that what follows will be better? Of course they cannot. Then how can they be so hot for action? And can President Obama (holder of the Nobel Peace Prize and, so far as I can recall, not elected on a platform of war-making in either 2008 or 2012)please make up his mind? Is his Syrian intervention a self-contained punitive strike, as we are told? Or is it in fact a plan for regime change, as the BBC reported he had told neo-conservative war enthusiasts? One or the other, but not both.

One final thing, a small problem for the Churchill part of the ‘good war’ cult. Churchill himself did not share Mr Obama’s and Mr Cameron’s disdain for chemical weapons. The ‘Guardian’ published this interesting historical reflection earlier this week.

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15 March 2013 4:55 PM

A few thoughts about a curious debate on Thursday night at the Cambridge Union, almost always the sharper of the two great University debating societies. It may be the chamber. The Oxford Union debates in what always seems to be an enormous, freezing sepulchre, with the ceiling lost in gloom, high above. Cambridge has a smaller, more intimate room, in which laughter stands a better chance. It may be Cambridge’s frostier, more astringent climate as compared with Oxford’s melancholy, soft dankness. Or it may just be that this is the way the luck has fallen for me on the dozen or so times I’ve struggled into my decrepit, baggy dinner jacket, and wrenched my annoying red bow tie into place for one of these occasions.

Anyway, last night we were debating New Labour. Had they ruined the country? Well, of course they had helped to do so, and had given the poor old thing a severe shove down the slopes of doom. But they’re hardly the only culprit. It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, with a whole queue of suspects serially plunging the knife into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its heirs and successors.

And then again, it’s still the case that if an Oxbridge debating society wants to discuss what’s wrong with Labour, they get Tories to speak for the motion, and Labour people to speak against it. It’s as if it’s a private fight, even though plenty of good patriots loathe the Tories, and plenty of proud socialists loathe Labour. I hesitated over accepting the invitation, as I knew it would mean sharing a bench with Tories, whom I regard as my opponents just as much as Labour. On the other hand, these events don’t decide the fate of the nation, but they may just possibly help people to think – people who in a few years will be in influential positions in our society.

The outgoing President, Ben Kentish, opened for the Labour defence rather naughtily, saying that it was going to be very tough for my side to prove the rather severe proposition ‘New Labour Ruined Britain’. I pointed out to him that since he had written the motion himself , it was he who had set the bar too high for us. If he hadn’t liked it, he could have fixed it. There was also a glorious moment when, after Mr Kentish had been railing for some minutes against the Horrors Of The Evil Thatcher Regime, a rather beautiful woman in the audience asked him sweetly how old he had been at the time. Mr Kentish was forced to admit that he had not yet been born during the Thatcher Terror, which took some of the whizz and bite out of his denunciation.

Hazel Blears, for New Labour, made a silly reference to the fact that all the speakers on the anti-Blair side were ‘white’ (I should have said ‘grey’ was a better description, but there) , and was a bit incommoded when I said that I thought it was time skin colour stopped being important to civilised people. What mattered was the content of their characters. I felt she never quite got her zing back after that, but maybe that was just my conceit.

The Tories, John Redwood and Andrew Mitchell, said pretty much what Tories do say, about the economy and the Gold Reserves, and in Mr Redwood’s case about the EU.

A contributor from the floor, rightly in my view, complained that the old-fashioned Left had no advocate among the main speakers.

So, when it came to my turn, I thought that I could, to some extent, put that right. Amazingly, you might think, nobody had so far mentioned the Iraq invasion. I did, and was slightly amazed to find Andy Burnham jumping up and asking righteously if I wished Saddam Hussein was still in power. I said (which is true) that I supposed that was the implication of what I said, since I was against invading other people’s countries to change their governments. But I did also point out that the Blair creature had said clearly during the preparations for the invasion that his aim was not to topple Saddam (Chapter and verse, for those interested : 25th February 2003, Blair: ‘I do not want war. I do not believe anyone in this House wants war. But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam’s active co-operation. I detest his regime but *even now he can save it* (my emphasis) by complying with United Nations demands …the path to peace is clear’ (House of Commons Hansard)) . Blair got into a similar mess about Slobodan Milosevic, and had had to be rescued from his militancy by a NATO spokesman in April 1999, after first calling for Milosevic to ‘step down’ . I also tried to undermine some New Labour piffle about the marvellous NHS by contrasting it with the catastrophe of the Stafford hospital scandal, showing as it does that pouring billions into a nationalised health service does not automatically improve the health of the people.

But I also turned on the Tories, for complaining about the Labour surrender to the EU when they were only additions to surrenders made during the Thatcher and Major years. I also mocked their noisy complaints about Gordon Brown’s sale of the gold reserves, by pointing out that, at the time, the Tory front bench did nothing, and it was left to the eminent backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell to raise the matter in the Commons. This was typical of the supine state of the Tory party in the face of New Labour for most of its existence (they did of course fail to oppose the Iraq adventure). As I said, the first New Labour government was really the John Major government.

Perhaps I was too keen to peel off the many left-wingers there, to concentrate on the whole conservative indictment. I mentioned identity cards and detention without trial, and the attack on the constitution, but clean forgot to mention mass immigration. Was this a Freudian memory slip? Who knows? By the way, the whole thing was recorded and will sooner or later be put up on the web, and I acknowledge that this is a wholly partial account which concentrates very much on my own contribution.

Anyway, the result was interesting – an enormous number of abstentions, many fewer votes for New Labour, and even fewer for the motion itself, though the margin wasn’t that great. The abstentions, in effect, won, which is rather an unusual outcome. I like to think that the Left-wingers there decided they would rather abstain than support that tawdry government, though they certainly weren’t going to vote with Tories. I also like to think (after some post-debate conversations) that I may have encouraged them to do so. Unscrupulous? I don’t think so. I did oppose the Iraq war. I did oppose identity cards and detention without trial. On such things I’m quite willing to form alliances with opponents, as they rise above other issues. It’s an interesting exercise, both for Cambridge undergraduates who probably loathe me as a right-wing monster, and for me as someone who believes a new coalition in politics is possible, in consorting with the enemy, and wondering where the true boundaries really lie in British politics.

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10 October 2011 10:28 AM

There is a certain smugness about the supporters of the Libyan adventure just now. Are they right to feel that way? I of course have an interest to declare, having opposed the intervention on principle, regardless of whether it did good or not. I did not think, and do not think, that the internal affairs of Libya are any business of the United Kingdom. I do not in any way withdraw from these positions now. I still think they were right, and I will try to explain why.

But, more to the point, I did not think that the backers of our interference knew what they were doing, or why they were doing it. I strongly suspect that France’s President Sarkozy was anxious for a foreign policy success to strengthen his feeble political position. And his enthusiasm, dressed up as humanitarianism, infected the British government too. They then had a machismo contest. Both governments, in my view, were very lucky that things turned out as they did. But their luck doesn’t cancel out the strong arguments for non-intervention. Nor does it show that their initial judgement was right. Anthony Blair was similarly lucky with the short-term outcome of his bravado in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Because he mistook his luck for judgement, he entangled us in the Iraq tragedy, a disaster so serious that it is hardly even mentioned any more. Who knows what future frightfulness David Cameron will get us into, now he’s a war hero?

Who now bothers to look at Iraq, and see how it is governed and who is really in charge, and how free it really is, and what the tensions are between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, and what sort of future lies ahead for it? It is as if it no longer existed. Yet once it was so important to us that it was worth a hugely violent and expensive invasion (one of the main reasons for the economic crisis we’re now in, by the way) . Mind you, it’s also a while since I’ve seen much of an analysis of Kosovo or Sierra Leone . Afghanistan, another alleged success, is about to be abandoned , a retreat we will conceal by declaring victory. But everyone knows it has been a devastating, wasteful failure.

I have never been convinced by arguments that our actions prevented a massacre in Benghazi, or that this serves as a justification for the whole business. We have no real idea if such a massacre would really have happened if Colonel Gadaffi’s troops had taken the city. I am, I must admit, a bit short of information on what has really happened to Gadaffi supporters since ‘our’ side took over, though it is plain that sub-Saharan Africans, accused of being Gadaffi mercenaries, have had very rough treatment indeed, which I think can fairly be described as racialist.

In any case, we (the British government and interventionist lobby) are not that opposed to massacres. Our attitude to the appalling savagery and repression of the regime in Bahrain has been utterly complacent, if not actually supportive. Our posturing over Syria’s unmerciful repression of dissent has been simultaneously self-righteous and feeble.

Personally, my criticism of this position is this . We should not pretend to an outrage we cannot or will not express in action. By doing so, we only encourage people to believe that help will come when it won’t, and so make it more likely that they will take terrible risks which they would be wiser not to take.

I know that some people find my readiness to stand back, and my open admission that I do not truly care about repression in the Arab world, hard to stomach. I don’t like it much myself. TV coverage makes the world’s ugliness all too obvious. Knowledge of horror, without the power to stop it, is an awful burden on us. I hate to see cruelty and brutality, and I love liberty. But when I am moved by witnessing the plight of people far away, I honestly confess to myself that my emotions are just self-indulgence, especially when there are lonely old ladies and other sad persons living within a mile of my home, about whom I do little or nothing. Essentially, I would be acting, if I supported these interventions, to make myself feel better about myself. I would not be acting to do actual, measurable, unselfish good.

But when I say I do not care, I am provocatively contrasting my position with those who say they do care, but take no effective and consistent action to prove it. If they reply, ‘We act when we can’, as they do, I reply, ‘But when you say you “can” you actually mean, when you like, or when it suits you, or when it is easy, because it would be perfectly physically possible for the British or US governments to take military action anywhere in the Arab world if they really wanted to. The truth is that they are not prepared to pay the price in blood or money or lost influence that would be demanded.’

True chivalry, the thing they pretend to have, does not pay any attention to such considerations. It acts at all costs.

And so, once again, I point out that anomalies and inconsistencies are signposts to the truth. If someone claims to have a principle, and he does not apply it universally, it is not a principle. Nor is it the reason for the action which he says is principled. There must be another reason.

These days, I suspect that reason is mainly personal vanity combined with electoral calculation.

My very longstanding position, that the nation is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, is in reality kinder and more sensible. It is kinder particularly because it does not encourage people into futile revolts which will then be crushed amid fire and screams. I might add that Syria’s regime, which is unlovely and which I have often criticised in the past when it was not fashionable to do so, may yet be preferable to whatever replaces it. Syria, for example, is one of the last countries in the Middle East in which the Christian Arab minority lives without persecution. That is why it is host to so many Christian refuges from Baghdad, where our war has led to horrible persecution of the remaining Christians in that country. It is unlikely this arrangement would survive the fall of the Assad dynasty.

My secondary position, that the extraordinarily rare and delicate liberties of Protestant Christian Anglospshere nations, founded on centuries of inviolate sovereignty behind broad seas, cannot be transplanted into recently decolonised Muslim semi-desert states, should also be borne in mind.

Everyone knows this really, but rather than admit it, we close our eyes to the unavoidable lawlessness and intolerance of the new regimes we have brought into being, and concentrate on the empty forms of democracy (elections, parliaments etc) which we make them adopt as the price of our continued benevolence.

What a lot of rubbish all this intervention is. But we repeatedly solve the problem by declaring ‘mission accomplished’ and then ceasing to pay any attention at all to what is really happening in the newly-liberated paradises whose revolutions we were celebrating the day before yesterday. Those who rejoiced over the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime have been particularly good at ignoring the faults of what has followed . Apartheid was of course indefensible, but, while the radical interventionists weren’t at all responsible for the nasty old arrangements, they will be partly responsible for what follows. And if there is one day a Mugabe-like despotism in Pretoria, which is by no means impossible, who will do the accounting to say that we have actually done good there? It is beyond me to make the calculation.

There’s a thought-proving scene at the end of that clever film ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’, in which this aspect of intervention is explored through a parable. The message is that, again and again, what you think is a good outcome turns out to be bad, and vice versa. If you wait long enough, you find out the truth, too late. It seems to me to be far too early to be describing our Libyan intervention as a success. Please forgive me if I continue to argue that we shouldn’t have done it.

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24 September 2011 10:10 PM

There used to be a sport called ‘all-in wrestling’ which was funny because it was faked.

Despite all the grunts, squeals and crashes, as huge bodies were slammed, gasping, on to the canvas, we all knew it wasn’t serious. Of course, it must have hurt a bit. And occasionally the giant grapplers must have truly lost their tempers. But the louder it was, the phonier it was.

I do hope people realise that the same is true of the current alleged row between Nicholas Clegg’s Liberal Democrats and David Cameron’s Liberal Conservatives. Mr Cameron is far closer to Mr Clegg than he is to his own voters. He loves being manacled to him, and much prefers Coalition to governing alone.

Mr Clegg helps David Cameron ensure that the Government remains pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-tax, politically correct and pro-immigration. But he suffers from the bottomless stupidity of his Left-wing members and voters, who can never see when they’re well off.

Anthony Blair had the same difficulty. The Left were too thick to see that New Labour were the most revolutionary Leftist British Government since Cromwell. They thought – and still think – that Mr Blair was a traitor. Stupidity explains a lot in modern British politics. But that’s democracy for you.

So we have the ludicrous position we have now, where the real traitor, Mr Cameron, still commands the loyalty of his party.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who have allowed Mr Cameron to ignore his voters and run a Leftist Government, have lost most of their Leftist support.

This is the reason for the silly fake fight, in which Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron pretend to be at odds about the 50p tax rate, or Human Rights, and various senior Liberals call the Tories rude names.

The Tory conference in Manchester next week will contain quite a few matching attacks on the ‘Yellow B******s’, which will be just as empty.

But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.

There will be some pretext or other – probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.

The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of 'confidence and supply’.

Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission – a seat falls vacant in 2014.

If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few ‘Right-wing’ measures through Parliament.

And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.

The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.

Unlike the wrestling, this fraud isn’t funny.

It is deadly serious, and we shall all pay for it.

Words that have no place at Downton

I have finally forced myself to watch Downton Abbey. Oh dear. It’s the usual problem, of microscopic attention to cars and clothes and no attention at all to what people were really like.

Edwardians did not use the phrase ‘as if’ to express scorn for a suggestion. Nor did they say ‘ta da!’ when they successfully baked cakes. As for the much trumpeted realism of the trenches (pictured right),I’ve seen children’s play areas in urban parks more menacing and squalid than these neat, dry diggings.

But at least Downton is entertaining. This cannot be said for the awful, miserable cadaver that is the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have explained just how bad this film is, and why, on my blog.

Anyone who has read the book or seen the Alec Guinness TV version will be deeply disappointed. And anyone who hasn’t will be baffled.

Advice nobody needs

We learn that David Cameron has been entertaining Anthony Blair at Chequers, supposedly to get his advice on foreign policy.

Several questions arise. First, how did he get him to leave once he arrived? Gordon Brown spent ten years trying to evict him.

Second, of all the people in all the world to ask about foreign affairs, Mr Blair is the last counsellor any sane person would choose. Not only was he responsible, personally and deeply, for the worst British foreign policy blunder of the past 50 years, the Iraq War, but he is so ignorant he doesn’t know they speak Portuguese in Brazil. He has been the despair of foreign policy experts brought in to brief him, and recently revealed he had never even heard of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the leader of Iran famously overthrown by a joint MI6-CIA putsch in 1953.

Mr Cameron’s self-promoting speech about his Libya intervention is another worrying sign that he is turning into another Blair. Could Libya be Mr Cameron’s Kosovo – an apparent success (actually not as nice as it looks) that gives him a taste for bombs and bullets?

* * * My article last week on mass immigration in the lovely old town of Boston in Lincolnshire was denounced as ‘insulting’ and ‘inaccurate’ by the town’s council leader, Peter Bedford. I hadn’t, as it happened, criticised either him or his council and I stand by every word in the article. Mr Bedford has made a great palaver of ‘inviting’ me to revisit Boston, as if he in some way owned it or controlled access to it. He doesn’t. I’ll come and go as I please, thanks. But perhaps the people of Boston – several of whom have contacted me to endorse what I wrote – might ask whether Mr Bedford and his officials have better and more urgent things to do than issue silly public denunciations of truthful articles.

* * * War on Drugs Latest. Despite the alleged savage persecution of cannabis users, I observed a book of recipes for cannabis cakes on sale, very prominently displayed, in Blackwell’s highly respectable bookshop in Oxford. Believe me. There is not, and never has been, any war on drugs.

* * *I am grieved to have to tell you that the plan to make us all live by Berlin Time is not yet dead. The horrible scheme, apparently buried by the Government many months ago, has escaped from its coffin and thrust its stiffened fingers through the earth heaped upon its grave.

Millions of people would have their lives made worse by this plan to make us go towork and school in the dark in winter, and postpone darkness till 11pm in summer.

Yet parliamentary opposition has come only from Scotland, where the problems would be even worse than in England.

Are there no English MPs prepared to defend our freedom to set our clocks by our own meridian, instead of a German one?

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